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Ken Rockwell photo contest results

i don't see why first place won personally :S
it's colorful, but there's a lot to nitpick about the image imo.

the lines not being straight (or maybe it's a bit of distortion) kind of ruins the simplicity of the image and the pots and frogs don't really seem to add to the scene
there just doesn't seem to be much depth or creativity to it

it would be hard to choose between the many pictures i think are good though, lots of good landscapes and people pictures, the animal/nature ones don't seem too inspiring. my favorite one in that category is the bird picture
 
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Your link was the first I had heard of this contest(not that I am good enough to enter it anyway). However, looking through those, that closeup of the soldier's face is my favorite. I also thought the boat one below it was an impressive shot.
 
I thought that the winner was the least memorable picture of the bunch, other than it being named the winner. Second place was my favorite. A free ipad 2 though? An ipad 3 would be more appropriate, especially with its improved resolution.
 
Some of these suck. Also, the "critiques" all say they should have Photoshopped this or that into the picture. Is it a photo contest or a photo manipulation contest?

The "HDR" picture of the soldier is awful

Files.ashx
 
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Seems to me like a some of those posters are insulted that a photo which could have been taken by a kid with a P&S won the contest, while those with their $4000 of gear and hours of Lightroom butchering didn't.

If anything, I would have picked either the last one with the wide angle landscape shot, or the the one with the shadowy uniformed soldier in B&W.
 
I think the winner was BS. It is a photo of a painting on a wall.... KR liked the painting, not the photo. I really liked 2nd place though, and I thought that his reasons for it not to be first were also BS. I did agree with the criticism of Runner-Up #1 (wave + seagulls), the gulls were too small to make any impact. Runner-Up #2 (jumping silhouette people over canyon) was a pretty hackneyed image and IMO there were several stronger images that KR didn't rate as highly. "Devin Toner" (tree on side of cliff) is probably my favorite of the remainder and would have been my #1 or #2. Although it also suffers from the distraction problem, and the two black dots (balloons?) on the right side should have been edited out.
 
Should have called it a photoshop contest. In all of his "This would have won if" sections, its always how they could have photoshopped the crap out of it and then he would have liked it.
 
Throckmorton said:
Some of these suck. Also, the "critiques" all say they should have Photoshopped this or that into the picture. Is it a photo contest or a photo manipulation contest?

The "HDR" picture of the soldier is awful
Click to expand...


Yeah that truly is terrible. Most uses of HDR annoy the hell out of me, that one especially. Way over done.

That said, most people here seem to be misinterpreting the Photoshop comments. It does appear to be looking mostly for dodging/burning, selective exposure adjustments, and natural cropping/editing methods that simply take place in photo-editing programs these days, instead of the dark room.

Do y'all really think the most powerful and familiar photos of the film era are prints straight from the negative/slide, without tooling around with anything? Quite often, they are, for the most part... but many have seen the photographer working like crazy in the darkroom to get a unique print.
 
Well with the waves picture, Ken says the birds should have been chopped out, and with the lame "jumping shot" he says to add some kind of sunburst.


A lot of these have technical issues, like the fawn and the jump shot being partially blurred. If I took those pictures I wouldn't post them on Facebook except as documentation of having jumped or having seen a deer. The crashing waves in black and white is just lame. It's a landscape yet it's not pretty. The birds add some life to the shot, but that was exactly what Ken Rockwell dinged it for.

From the start, Ken says he chose the pictures he liked. By that I think he meant he didn't even try to be objective. There are such things as good and bad art and learning to tell them apart is important... especially for your own work. It's not just composition and color and things like that, but also craftsmanship as my high school art teacher used to say. A blurry deer is bad craftsmanship and the photographer should have never entered it. I took 1995 photos yesterday and posted 62 of them on Facebook, of which 4 were good enough to post on 500px.
 
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BTW I was looking at Ken Rockwell's pictures of his Maui trip the other day. There were maybe 3 pictures of Maui, 1 with his hot wife in the background, and 300 of his kids with awkward expressions on their faces. He was so obsessed with demonstrating the technical qualities of the Canon he was reviewing that he apparently didn't take any vacation photos or landscapes.

http://www.kenrockwell.com/trips/2010-05-maui/index.htm
 
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I've always said, all photos must be manipulated when it comes to digital. Whether if it's white balance correction, spotting, it's all one form of manipulation. Now there's this new trend of HDR + Tone mapping coming into play, which enhances all the tonal values. I guess he should've specified what are the rules to the contest. If no rules apply, then you get full creative control. What the artists' original vision/intention. If they have an ugly picture of an HDR scene, oh well lol.

But then again, it's Ken Rockwell. A lot of people, most people, doesn't really respect his website anyways...
 
first i heard of it, but what the heck. Lol @ "If you replaced the background, put in bright sun with rays, it DEFINITELY would have won! Too bad he didn't do that in Photoshop!"


Unlike you guys, I liked the winner and think it should have won. I think the pots added to it - they like anchors in a photo, and make it 3 dimensional instead of being a simple 2D flat image, so I'm okay with it. Unlike KR, I don't think there is anything wrong with the clip of the feet on the right side...conveys a sense of motion for the frog. He starts off stationary, and you see the whole wrong, and by the end the dynamic motion is enough such that he is off the frame.

I think he is too critical and doesn't see the bigger picture. the 2nd place was great too - the bubbles also served as anchors- if you didn't have those, the image would feel empty (unless you literally cropped to the absolute edges of the big bubble, but then you lose perspective). To me the background is hazy and unclear, but you look to the bubble --> something that we think distorts the reality around it, to gain the clarity that we are seeking.

The birds photo is where it gets ridiculous. "If the bird was bla bla bla, that would have won!" as if he had control over the birds. It gets ridiuclous when he talks about changing the composition radically in photoshop.

Sure there are no rules, and its my opinion, but I think i explained my BS is explained better 😛
 
Heh, I just spent some time reading some of the 105 replies/comments to the contest results. Some of the comments are pretty on point. Many of them mention that KR is a good equipment reviewer but a poor photographer. I think this is a good summary. I don't mind KR when I'm reading his equipment reviews (and I have relied on those reviews in several instances in the past), but when it comes to his photographic taste, or even to his philosophy of photography, I generally have to hold my nose. I had never put enough thought into Ken Rockwell to realize this for myself; I always just thought I had a weird like/dislike (not strong enough to be love/hate) thing going on for him. Now I know that it's just two aspects of his site, one which I like, the other I do not.
 
slashbinslashbash said:
Heh, I just spent some time reading some of the 105 replies/comments to the contest results. Some of the comments are pretty on point. Many of them mention that KR is a good equipment reviewer but a poor photographer. I think this is a good summary. I don't mind KR when I'm reading his equipment reviews (and I have relied on those reviews in several instances in the past), but when it comes to his photographic taste, or even to his philosophy of photography, I generally have to hold my nose. I had never put enough thought into Ken Rockwell to realize this for myself; I always just thought I had a weird like/dislike (not strong enough to be love/hate) thing going on for him. Now I know that it's just two aspects of his site, one which I like, the other I do not.
Click to expand...

There you go. I do give his work a lot of slack since photography is art, but otherwise - my feelings exactly.

JR
 
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